With all the arguments about virtual machines lately, people
might like to check out idel.
It picks out a different point in the design space from
stuff like the JVM -- closer to a hardware instruction set,
using software fault isolation for safety.

My E compiler has gone through its big reorg
and is passing all its tests again. I'd like to get started
on the JVM backend soon, but with all the time going into
finding work and scraping together rent money, it's iffy.

A headhunter emailed me about a job opening, which was nice,
as I'm looking for work, except that the description looked
familiar. Sure enough, poking around a local company's
website turned up the exact same job ad which I'd seen
already, so I replied with a one-liner saying thanks but I'd
go straight to the company, and figured that was the end of
it.

They replied:

I have been contracted by Company
to recruit for this position. I
respect that you are intelligent enough to determine the
client, I would
also hope that you would respect the way we have chosen to
work. If you are
interested in the position, Please send me an MSWord version
of you resume
so that I may determine the fit per my clients
request.

(In their original email they said they'd seen my resume
already on hotjobs.com (which I hadn't posted it to, at
least not directly).) I wonder, is all this silliness old
hat to other jobseekers?

I posted
about this to livejournal once: Sun patented
a three-line assembly program that had already appeared in a
famous paper in the previous decade. There needs to be a
wiki or something for collecting these cases; I helped
start one up but its server is down now.

Readability of RPN

I agree that having to track through the effects of
stack
manipulations hurts Forth's readability. That's why when I
made up a variant of Forth for idel
it had no stack-manipulation words: you use local variables
for everything instead. The result seems more readable than
assembly code, the more obvious language type that could've
been used there.

If indeed workers do serve a large colony in order to win
prestige and acquire rank, there must be a mechanism that
demonstrates each individual's ability reliably.

The mechanism that seems likeliest to us is pheromones.
...It is known that the pheromone secreted by the queen
motivates workers to serve her. Bees are very eager for
the pheromone and lick it off the body of the queen.
Workers can get the pheromone directly from the body of the
queen when they serve her, or indirectly, from workers who
have served the queen.

from The Handicap Principle by Zahavi and Zahavi.

So, does this sound like advogato? Is it a coincidence?

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